President Joe Biden’s call for increased public support for childcare in his joint address to Congress highlights an issue that has been the subject of growing bipartisan collaboration. Over the past few decades, Republicans have increasingly embraced the idea that the government can play a bigger role in providing quality childcare for working families, responding to the fact that nearly two-thirds of U.S. households do not have parents who stay at home.

Mike Parson, Republican governor of Missouri, said in his January speech: “Our children are tomorrow’s workforce. . . If we really want to make a difference in their lives, it starts with early childhood development. “

Two of the first states to introduce broad public preschool for 4-year-olds were Georgia and Oklahoma in the 1990s, and the state with the highest-scoring system is Alabama, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research.

But the country is now facing a realignment of childcare policy. Two paths are waiting for you: On the one hand, the economic and educational imperative of childcare is integrated into the American psyche, expands gender equality and ensures that public funding for the first few years is expected as well as public funding for the school years. Childcare, on the other hand, becomes another front in the culture wars as a camp resists government intrusion into the private sphere and former allies retreat to their respective corners.

The danger of collapse became apparent soon after Biden’s address when writer and rumored Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance tweeted that “universal daycare is a class struggle against ordinary people” – the “ordinary people” are those who have a care agreement prefer a parent. Vance was then on Tucker Carlson’s show and repeated these claims to a wide audience.

This is not a marginal position. In the GOP response to Biden’s address, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott warned that the President’s plan would “put Washington more in the middle of your life – from cradle to college.” Scott’s Senate colleague Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., Was less shy when she tweeted an old article on the Soviet Union’s childcare system that said, “You know who else liked universal daycare.” In March, Idaho declined a $ 6 million federal childcare grant – over objections from corporate groups – in part because state lawmakers expressed concerns about government indoctrination of children.

This view is a throwback to the so-called “traditional values” that conservatives vocalized decades ago. In 1971, President Richard Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have created a national day care system, stating that it would “place the tremendous moral authority of the national government on the side of local approaches to child rearing [and] against the family-centered approach. “

Since the turn of the millennium, however, two threads have drawn the parties closer together on this issue. The first was acceptance of the fact that mothers of young children, whether they liked it or not, had entered the world of work in large numbers and were going nowhere. While certain populations of American women have always worked, at the time of Nixon’s veto, fewer than 40% of mothers with children under the age of 5 were in employment. This number has been around two thirds since the late 1990s.

The second thread was the emerging brain research showing that early childhood experiences, including childcare, are fundamental to later academic and life outcomes. The Republicans were therefore able to support an increase in childcare funding for economic reasons: The US Chamber of Commerce has been loud in favor, and the Trump White House hosted a high-profile childcare summit in December 2019.

While Republicans face the question of whether to give up those positions after a Democratic president takes the matter up, Democrats face the question of choice when it comes to staying home.

Indeed, Americans want a dizzying variety of care facilities: secular daycare, faith-based options, home day care, public front yard, relatives, one-parent care. These preferences can change based on the age and family circumstances of the children and vary by population group. While Biden’s childcare suggestions are optional and include all types of outside care, they are silent about parents who stay at home.

The significant proportion of families who want some level of parental care – and the fact that many families have financial problems because they have traded childcare costs for lower incomes – has led some on both sides of the aisle to Request a home care allowance (in addition to the recently expanded child tax credit that is not dependent on care). Paying parents to stay at home is a left-rooted concept, although it has been controversial in feminist circles because the pressures to stay home are likely so heavily on women. Nordic countries like Finland and Sweden have used home care payments for parents who opt out of publicly supported childcare. If the Democrats included such an option in their plans, it would likely divert some criticisms from their opponents.

However, the reality for the Republican Party is that it’s already badly underwater with women. The coronavirus pandemic has only compounded the pain, especially mothers, with the lack of affordable childcare. Expanded public support for childcare is hugely popular: A Yahoo News / YouGov poll in April found 58% of Americans are in favor of providing a universal Pre-K to all children. And 60% – including 64% women and 41% Republicans – supported increasing subsidies to reduce childcare costs. While those numbers would surely decrease with a persistent messaging attack, support for childcare seems both broad and deep.

Some Conservatives, such as Vance and Senator Josh Hawley, R-Mo., Have advocated direct financial assistance from parents as an alternative to childcare expenses. While such payments could help with general child-rearing costs, Hawley’s suggestion of $ 12,000 per year for married couples (and $ 6,000 for single parents) isn’t enough to address many parents’ problems. Group care is necessarily expensive as the child-to-adult ratio must be low; Experts calculate that the cost of high quality care averages $ 15,000 to $ 30,000 per child, depending on age and location. The lack of money flowing into the childcare sector explains the difficulty parents have in finding slots before the pandemic, as well as persistently low wages and high staff turnover. These programs could pose a political risk to conservative Republicans who oppose expanding social services by persuading parents to stay home.

For the past two decades, the childcare debate remained largely under the surface as American politics became more polarized. While the Presidents mentioned the issue, it was not a centerpiece of an agenda and the plans offered were limited. The ground has now shifted, and how policymakers react will determine childcare policies for the 2020s and beyond.

Elliot Haspel is the Education Policy and Research Program Director at the Robins Foundation in Richmond. He is the author of “Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis And How To Fix It”. The Washington Post